The Apathy Obstacle: How To Uncover A Huge Cash Windfall Hidden In Your Business - with Jason Fladlien - I Love Marketing Episode #328

Not that they don't have good products or services, they just have lousy marketing. There's less people that have great marketing and lousy products and services than there are people that have great products and services. Bigger issue is the marketing and the way that they sell it and position. It is usually the biggest dilemma that most entrepreneurs struggle with.

I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish and.

This is the I Love Marketing podcast. Do you know the hidden assets that.

Could potentially be worth millions to you? How does one market to the apathetic? Join Joe, Dean and Jason for an inside look at marketing wins that can make you a lot more money. Remember to subscribe to I Love Marketing so you don't miss a Future episode. Visit ilovemarketing.com subscribe for more. Hey everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

And again, our special guest who just seems to be tagging along on a lot of these things, the third amigo.

As we said.

Present yourself, mystery man.

I am presenting myself, Jason Fladlad here at your service.

So wait, why should the name Jason Flatland be important to anybody, Mr. Flavin?

Oh God, it's, you know, it's just I make people's lives less miserable slightly just enough so they pay me money to do so.

So Dean, you're at some hotel somewhere and you've got a, like not just some hotel, Joe.

I'm in, I'm in the Hazleton Hotel in Toronto. Just had a nice brunch with Dan Sullivan and heading tonight overnight to London and we'll arrive tomorrow morning in London there for a week and doing a breakthrough blueprint there and then off to Amsterdam, doing an event there and we'll see our friend Ilko in, in Amsterdam and then back to Toronto and then to Chicago where I'll see you and we'll see Dan. And for our game changer event, our game changer program in Chicago. Yeah.

That's awesome.

Well, you're going to be in Toronto between now and then?

Yeah, I'm going to be on a couple week vacation. I'll be spending a week with Dan and Babs at their cabin doing free days, attempting not to have Dan asked me any marketing questions, you know, because to keep him on track so he does proper free days.

I love it.

You know, the same thing that people cabin.

And. Yeah.

So it'll be, it'll be great. It's not like a rustic cabin though.

It's pretty.

I know, that's what I meant. It's pretty funny actually. Kind of like the four Seasons version of a cabin. And I just saw Jason. I was just in LA and Jason came out. Yeah, talk about that.

Because you were at Ari's.

Yeah, I was doing a little talk at Ari Meisel's event on automation and optimization and that was pretty cool. And what else? I mean, look in the last couple of weeks and we've all had some cool things going on at the time you're listening to this. I have a new book that's out called the Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery. So anyone that has. Anyone in their life that is struggling with addiction and wants to, you know, make the morning, you know, create your best day ever by starting in the morning. And there's a lot of just great strategies there. So that book came out. My co authors on that are Hal Elrod and the wonderful Anna David who has written six books on addiction recovery. She's a New York Times best selling author. She's been in recovery for many, many years. So ye. Yeah, that's that. I think I mentioned this on the last time we did it. We had just done a podcast episode and Jason was even out in Sedona. Our first addiction documentary called Blackstar for artists for addicts.com won the Illuminate Film Festival Audience Choice Awards. So that was pretty cool. And yeah, just been, you know, speaking and traveling. We just did an amazing Genius Network meeting last week. And then by the time I see you next, Dean, I'll have gone on an Alaskan fishing trip of all things with Dave Asprey. And I rented a whole island out there and so call it a fishing trip, but it's basically a bunch of cool people on an island and boats and looking at whales and doing all kinds of cool stuff. And Dave Asprey I think will be like killing fish with his bare hand or something, which is. We'll see what happens.

Where, yeah, where can, where can we see the movie? Is it available yet?

Well, what we're going to do, and I'm not sure, you know, if people want to be notified, go to Artists with an s. Artists for addicts.com people often say the name wrong. They're like, artists for Addiction. It's like, no, Artists for Addicts. Not like let's encourage addiction, but let's encourage helping people that struggle with addiction, which would be addicts. So it's artistsforaddicts.com and we're gonna actually have a free screening of it for just a short period of time and then hopefully we'll get that. We're gonna expand it. We're gonna actually add more to it. And everyone that has seen it is like, wow. Right now, the version that we showed in sedona was a 30 minute version. So it was a short documentary, about 35 minutes. But we're gonna expand it and hopefully it'll become a series. And we're recruiting a bun. You know, at my Genius Network annual event this year in November, I'm going to be interviewing the singer Alice Cooper on stage. And, you know, we've got a lot of cool people that are not just in the painting and sculptures and per se art in that arena world, but also musicians and writers and actors and actresses and, you know, different people. I mean, I just talked to Paul Abdul yesterday about choreographing a special thing that we're going to do, which is going to be pretty funny, but I'm going to keep that under wraps for now because it's more of a comedy skit than anything. Yeah, yeah. So. And then, of course, you know, Jason is, you know, running around teaching people how to do the best job with, you know, webinars. And he has a new book out called One to Many, which if you.

Listening to this.

If you're listening to this episode right now, like, if this is your first I love marketing episode or you happen to miss the one, listen to the one we just did with Jason on his book One to Many. And I highly recommend going to Amazon and getting a copy of that book because he's the best webinar guy in the world. And of course, the subject of this episode, we're in the middle of doing something with Genius Network right now about going internal to existing members, not just for the annual event, but we were having a conversation about when people drop out of something, even when they got value out of it, you know, what happens? What is that? And Jason had this. We had this great dialogue yesterday about apathy, about the whole subject of apathy. And the way that he described it, I thought was so good that I said, you know, we should do a podcast episode and we should talk about apathy on this so that our listeners could understand it. And here's one thing I wanted to actually mention too. You know, Dean, me and you were one of the first business podcasts that were very, very tactical on marketing. You know, and so a lot of, I mean, I run into people so much that say, yeah, I mean, I built my business using I love marketing. Even at this Ari Mizell event. I mean, half the people there came up to me and said, you know, I listen to your Podcast, and I've learned so much about it. Your name came up several times with people talking about the nine word email and about, you know, different things. Of course, I'm always talking about, you know, you actually both you guys now, because I think, you know, Jason's actually smarter than you are, Dean. But see, I had to throw in a jab. I haven't done one in, like, the last three minutes, so I figured I might. Yeah, like, oh, my God, it's been a bit several minutes since I insulted anybody. Let me just try to be nice here. No, but what I realized, and I've had several people tell me this, there's other podcasts, we won't mention their names, but everyone knows who they are because we've interviewed most of the people that have the big podcast, that have massive followings. They have a very broad appeal because of the subject matter. And simply, some people, their core businesses is nothing but books and podcasts, which is not our core businesses. We just kind of do those things off to the side. And one of the things that I've actually realized is although there's a lot of really interesting podcasts out there, there's not very many that tell you from a. There's exactly what to say, here's exactly what to do. I mean, there's a lot of interesting topics and a lot of philosophical things. And, you know, certainly we talk about that. And, you know, I'm, I'm. I'm. No, I don't hide the fact that I babble a lot about shit that just, you know, I want to talk about. When it comes to strategic stuff, though, you know, there's a guy I met, I said, yeah, just go download our breakthrough DNA report on ilove marketing.com. it doesn't sell anything. It literally lays out the eight profit activators. It gives you the exact sort of methodology. And then we have all of these episodes that tell you exactly how to implement each of those things, and you're before, during, and after units. And it made me realize that the stuff that we talk about here, although, you know, it's not, you know, it's not like just let's talk to a famous person stuff. It's. It's very actionable and it's very tactical. And I had, when I was talking with Jason, you know, he was, you know, we're talking about, like, a lot of. I don't know if you want to even bring this conversation up some. I'm being a little careful to what degree I say this, Jason, but there are Certain people that dispense relationship advice or they dispense, you know, certain type of, like, you know, how to. How to have your life completely together, whose lives are not very together, but they've built a whole, you know, business around it. And Jason said, you know, I just like teaching people tactical shit, like, you know, on how to make money, because that's never going to go out of style.

Tell them the real quote, Joe. Because we were in my car, we were driving to dinner, and I was talking to Joe about this, and I said, listen, that way I can remain completely fucked up. And I have to feel bad about it because I'm not gonna pretend like I know how to run my life. I just know how to do really cool stuff.

Yeah. And honestly, that's more authentic and real than most people. Right.

And.

Because everyone's gonna have stages where they got their shit together and other stages where they're off track, you know, And. And so when you have to. When you know, when you have to be. Have this perfectly polished image, like you always have your. Together to match your social media, like Instagram, fake life sort of portrayal, you might have to live into that image. And that's not always an easy thing to do when you're going through relationship problems or problems in all kinds of areas anyway. But the point is, we'll talk about tactics, let's talk about strategies, and. And let's talk about apathy, because there are people out there that listen to us, that they have stuff they want to sell and they have clients that they want to keep buying from them and they want to keep getting better. What I want is I want less manipulation and more expression of genuine value. And if you are not really delivering awesome stuff, but you have really awesome marketing, you got to get the awesome marketing to match the quality of meaning the stuff you are selling needs to live up to the hype of the marketing. In most cases, the problem that we have with people making money is not that they don't have good products or services, they just have lousy marketing. There are less people that have great marketing and lousy products and services than there are people that have great products and services and lousy marketing meaning. Hopefully I said that right. The bigger issue is the marketing and the way that they sell it and position. It is usually the biggest dilemma that most entrepreneurs struggle with. It's a combination of both. Obviously you want to keep improving everything, but at the end of the day, most people that would take the time to listen to. I love marketing and resonate with us are not scam artists that are just trying to fleece people. They're people that genuinely want to go deep with a relationship and they can't figure out, you know, the always why are they not.

I can't tell you how often I see that. So we've got. I don't know what. You've seen this too. I put together a profit activator scorecard. Yeah. So when people fill out the profit activator scorecard, they. What I see in there so often is and each of the eight mindsets are. Each are the profit activators. And I see people who are, you know, rank themselves really highly on profit activator one, which is they know who they want to serve. And then profit activator 5, where they're able to deliver a dream come true result. Right. They're able to do that. But this in between, they rate, they're really low on generating leads and converting leads. And so it's. So that's the biggest obstacle that people have that I see all the time. Of all of the scorecards that come in, I know immediately if somebody's high.

On.

Profit activity, number one and number five, that they know who they want, they know they can get a result for them, but they're low on generating leads or converting leads. That's somebody. We can solve that instantly. Where I get concerned with people is where they rate themselves, where they're not able to get the result for people and they're stronger on the marketing. That's a recipe for disaster. Right. Because from there on then you can see it in the rest of it that they're not getting repeat business, they're not getting referrals because they're. Once they. Once people realize that they don't have the goods, that it's a. That's a bigger problem, you know?

Exactly. So. So what are your thoughts on all that, Jason?

Oh, where to begin. So, you know, it kind of loose back to what we were talking about earlier is everybody's got problems at all given times. So if you're really focusing on your messaging, for example, and you're really focusing on the audience you want to serve, it's usually at the expense of something. So that might be the expense of actually generating the leads because you're so focused focused on what you're going to say to the lead when they come through the door or when they call you or when they email you, whatever, Right. Then the moment you flip that and you start focusing purely on let's get this message out in front of people so these people can respond to it. Then you focus so much more on the actual activity of getting attention, but usually at the expense of refining your message. And so this becomes this kind of pinball effect where you're running around, you know, dealing with this problem. You tend to do it enough that you kind of get it stable, but then you got to run back over there and deal with that problem. And even this is even true with companies that I've worked with who have hundreds of employees. It doesn't seem to be like, well, I'll just do this and you do this, and simultaneously magically will spit this out. And that kind of. That leading. That loops into me with what we're talking about with apathy is given a limited amount of time and attention, who are you willing to first focus on your company? People who are already paying you $25,000 who are sitting right in front of you meeting after meeting, or the people that paid you $25,000 once upon a time, who are no longer right in front of you, who do not come to the meetings. It's very easy to only focus on what's in front of you. And we all suffer from that. So the idea, though, becomes. Because, like, Joe and I identified probably $8 million worth of potential revenue and past customers who've already demonstrated the ability at one point in time to pay Joe money, which is a good indicator that they can pay money again. Right? And they're not. And so why aren't they? And that's. This is how this conversation occur. Because just as he sends me this voice, and I think these people are. Are not. And these are the standard reasons that I hear all the time, which is one of them is, maybe we did something that pissed them off. And that was one of. That was like a major one they talked about. I came and I said, I don't think that's the case, because I know statistically speaking, customers leave for more than any other reason because they don't feel appreciated, they don't feel loved, they don't feel noticed. And that's what the apathy that. I mean, that comes in. They either feel apathy towards them, or they feel apathy towards the thing that they're doing. They feel apathetic in business. They feel apathetic about the future prospects of growing their business. And if they feel apathetic about that, they're not going to continue to invest in things that are going to help them grow their business. And that's how that conversation came up. And so I think this is where all this loops into is, is when we tend to focus on what's working and what's successful. In the short term, our businesses can make a lot of money, but that also creates all this waste that it's not waste in the sense that it's bad. Right. What it means is it's a waste in potential resources that we have to also spend some of our time going back to existing customers, and they don't have to be. Right. But if we just can notice them and they pay us money, that's okay with me. Even if it's their fault. Even if there was no actual apathy, even though we were doing everything we could to be in contact with them and they just weren't getting our messages. I don't want to win and say I was not apathetic. You were apathetic and point fingers. I just want to show. Okay, now I'm acknowledging you. What do you need help with? And here's how I think we can help you.

Right.

So much of it is like it when I just. That's an amazing strategy, too, because when Joe Stumpfit, I were doing, by referral only, we're building. We were doing big events, big seminars every month, 6, 800 people. And one of the things that we had was a big group of people who had been part of our coaching program. That's a $5,000 program that the $5,000 a year they've been in the coaching program. And then for whatever reason, had left. So a very similar situation. And when we switched from an information coaching model into a. We gave people tools, and it was more of an implementation coaching model as opposed to just information.

Go do this.

It was, here's the tools and here's how to use them to get business.

We.

Had an asset that was available to us at each of the events, which was excess capacity in the event. Right. That's a. One of. That's a hidden asset that we had that if we're doing this event and we have 600 people, but we have capacity for 700 people, it's an asset that is lost. Right. So I wrote a letter that we would send to all the people who had been in the coaching program, inviting them to come back to the main event as our guest. No, no cost gave them a. Like a. You know, when you have a corporate corporation, you get the corporate seal that you can, like, stamp documents and it gets the embossing on it, you know, like the raised things. So we had a certificate or a, you know, voucher for A free event that was stamped and, you know, sealed like that. So it was all very official, inviting people back as our guests to come to the main event. And we would end up bringing in over the year that we did it. The last year that we were doing the main events, it was over a million dollars in revenue from turning straw into gold is what we were calling it.

Right.

That it's like turning something that these were people that we had a relationship. They would come to the event and they would convert back into the coaching program at a higher rate than the people who were coming there and paying to be at the main event. So we're giving them $1,000 gift, basically, to come back and. And see what we're up to. We've made a lot of changes. We appreciate. We want you to see everything that we've. That we've done. Plus, we miss you, so it'd be great to see you. And people took us up on the offer, and they would come, and then they would re. Re. Enroll in the. In the coaching program. Because it was a lot of difference. It was. I mean, it was. We'd made significant changes, I think, just like you were saying, Jason, just being acknowledged and recognized and appreciated, that that's. That's. There's a lot to it. And they loved us. At one point, they loved us enough that they joined the coaching program, which was, you know, not a $25,000 investment, but a $5,000 investment. Just the principle is the same.

Yeah, I really like that. And, you know, let me mention something, too, because I don't know if you even know this, Jason, but when me and Dean first started. I love marketing. I remember when we had had a conversation, I think it was. Was it the end of 2010 or 29? I don't know. Okay. Like, okay. It was a. It was a December 2010. Okay. And. And we had just had, like, an hour, hour and a half. I can't even remember now. It's been sitting. But we had had a conversation. We're just talking about business. We're just literally sharing business ideas. And I said to Dean, I go, could small business owners, entrepreneurs just listened to what we had just talked about for the last hour, and then I said, we should really start a podcast, because Dean had already been doing a podcast, Marketing Mondays. And that's when we came up with, like, let's do a podcast together. And the whole idea was, let's just share the things that we talk about and imagine people are listening to us just talk. Like, we would normally Talk. And we're just recording it and we're sharing it so that they can eavesdrop in on a conversation. And a lot of people that teach stuff will not go backstage and say, here's what we're trying to figure out. Here's the challenges that we're having. I mean, they kind of talk about it, but they really don't go that deep into it. And one of the things that I think we've done a pretty good job of on a lot of episodes especially, we used to do this a lot with the. With our early episodes, which are still. I think those things will be relevant 100 years, years from now. Because we had also said, like, what could we talk about from just a principal base that if someone stumbled into this, like a century later, they would still learn something. They would still say, oh, okay, you know, and so it just exists forever. I mean, that was like one of the things me and Dean had talked about. And I like these conversations and I'd like people to think about it. So, you know, we start talking about things that we're going through. You know, right now we're putting people into Genius Network. And I really. And wanting to get to the point to where the positioning of Genius Network because it really, you know, once people go there, they're like, wow, you know, I mean, it's very hard for people to understand the value of it unless they're there. Right. And so part of it is I actually want to get the positioning of it. So in the future, I'm not really even selling it. It's more like, you know, there's enough of demand and there's enough people that want to get in. It's more of like accepting who' really the most aligned and who's the right fit versus trying to enroll new people into it, per se. And so to go back with what me and Jason were talking about, it's very interesting because one of the challenges that I have is that I've created so many people trying to knock off 25k groups. If you can remember, Dean, even when I did my first $10,000 a year or thousand dollar a month program for carpet and upholstery cleaners back in 2000, Dan Kennedy, who was, you know, my guru, pretty much, you know, I would. As it related to marketing, you know, he was adamantly against it because he's like, oh, it's too expensive. No one's, you know, no one's going to do it. You got to be very careful about this. And I at the time Listened to everything that Dan suggested, and I went against his advice in that area, and I did it anyway. And then it was very successful. Then all the. All of a sudden, you know, it starts getting infiltrated throughout the whole, you know, GKIC world at everyone in that arena starts upping their prices, and they start modeling what I'm doing. And it, you know, put it created literally a whole new slew of ways to deliver, you know, coaching programs. And then I started giving away cars and contests, and everyone started knocking off that and blah, blah, blah. But in the same way, if you don't filter people with integrity properly, and it's really hard, a lot of these people will come into your world, present themselves as givers, and they're just there to take and they're there to copy, and they're there to knock you off. And then there becomes this whole confusion in the marketplace. And then if there's a million different options of coaching groups to choose from, it's less about. If people like your stuff, a lot of it has to do with, well, as soon as they leave an amazing meaning, and then you have 10 other people presenting to them, oh, this amazing meaning, they forget what it's actually like until they're really bonded and really integrated. And people don't refund a relationship. So the people that I have really strong relationships with, those people, in many cases, they'll continue to be in the group as long as it's really valuable and they're able to do it. But there's all these other things that are kind of on the line. And so I've been, you know, kind of talking it through, and that's where the whole concept of apathy came up. And so for, you know, I know I'm talking about my own business, but I think most people struggle with this sort of stuff. I mean, all of us do. So my question to you guys is, you know, how do we. How do we address it? How do we communicate to these people? How do we get them back? I mean, you just, you just. If they're worth getting back, I mean, because there are some people I don't want to have back, but there's other people that, you know, they're amazing, but they, you know, if they just, you know, were brought back into the fold and reframed, what this actually is for them, they will interact with it in a much deeper, better way. And so you talked about, Dean, how you went and sent a letter to buy referral only clients and invited them back to a main event, which is what Those events were called and you ended up getting a lot of them to get back into the fold. And that happens too. I mean, in Strategic Coach, you know, and it applies to me too. It's in, out, in. So they're in the group, they drop out of the group, they realize that their life was working better when they were in the group and then they join back up. And it happens to me, it happens to Dan Sullivan. I mean, they have a. There's terminology for it. In, out, in. But a lot of people won't come back in because they have to save face. They don't want to admit that they dropped out. So they go and look for another group because they don't want to face the person or whatever. And I think Jason had some really good ways of thinking about that and how to communicate that. And I think this is a problem that so many business owners have. And I'd love for us to figure that out in the best ways. And that's why I'd love to make the topic of this right now about that particular area.

You unselfishly hijacked the episode. Of course. Of course.

It's perfect.

I mean, unless you got something better. Unless you got some better. I'm willing to put.

You know, I'm teasing you.

No, of course. That was, that was a way of maintaining posturing with you right now.

I like that. Yeah.

So we're trained in NLP here. So we have to. You know, actually I'm not trading in nlp. I don't even know what I'm talking about right now. Okay, go ahead.

We've had just enough to be dangerous. We've had some conversations about this that I think for you specifically, there could be a lot of merit in framing that if you were to even frame or think about Genius Network as a 10 year membership or a lifetime membership, whatever it is, that is $250,000 that you can pay $25,000 a year. But to get people thinking in 10 year frameworks. Right. And measuring and acknowledging the ROI on that. And it's an interesting thing that is as soon as you build that awareness of it and really kind of presents it like Dan Sullivan has an interesting approach like their signature program, when they always talk about strategic coaches always presented as a three year program. Right. When they were talking about it year one, year two, year three, now it's moved into 10 times and the Game Changer. Every those are. The signature program is literally a seeder program now into the 10 times program and into Game Changer. But I think for you, it really could be about this. The longer the value of a network, of course, is multiplied by the number of connections that you have within it, but also by the length of time that you've been in it, you know.

Yeah, absolutely. I actually put my phone on mute. We are on the phone right now. Actual phones. You're in a phone in a hotel. Jason's on. Are you on a phone or what are you on right now? Jason, Are you on some sort of device?

I got this new AR technology. I'm just beaming it from my brain right to you guys.

How great is that? You know, I'm sitting there writing, writing down. Yeah, there's a lot to be said about framing it much longer program, because even when, even when I would do my platinum groups, and this is true. I mean, the first year I framed it as a three year program. And the focus was the first year was foundation, the second year was growth, and the third year was acceleration. And once, you know, and it took about that long, you know, that's one of the challenges. And again, challenges or opportunities, what, however you want to call it, has a lot to do with what sort of, you know, what the purpose of your group is. In my particular case, though, it takes a while for people to. What I've noticed with Genius Network is the longer someone is in the group, the more that they can extract value for themselves and the more meaningful it is and the more meaningful they become to other people. And, you know, when someone first starts working out, there's, you know, you're sore, you're not used to it, you don't, A lot of times you don't like it, it's uncomfortable. But if you kind of stick with it and you sort of get used to it, you build up strength and you build. If you're doing yoga, you build up flexibility. I tell people that are new in yoga, I mean, give it, you know, give it a month, give it six weeks and just, just be consistent with it. Do it at least, you know, three times a week. If you can do it more, even better. But after about a month, month to six weeks, something happens where you just are kind of in the flow. Well, in the same way that with a group, you know, it's. It doesn't happen that quickly. Sometimes it's a year, sometimes it's two years. Really, if it's, if it's a really great group and you're really aligned, you sort of get your stride after a certain period of time. So, yeah, framing it, I think is really Valuable I want. What I do wanted to talk about though, is if someone hasn't gone enough, I mean, and I deal with this in 12 step groups. They call it 90 meetings in 90 days, which is a really intense shift to someone's life. I mean, if someone's really going to do recovery, they have to be willing to change their whole life. I mean, literally, not just go to a meeting. I mean, you have to be willing to, to change your entire life if you want to do that. And that's a, that's a hard thing to swallow for a lot of people. They're not, they're not ready. They, even if they're not ready, it doesn't matter, because if you're an addict, you're gonna have to change your life or you could potentially die or go to jail or, you know, ruin everything that's valuable to you. So there's this whole, Is this another saying, which is, you know, anything that you put ahead of your recovery, you're gonna lose. If you put your relationship or your job or anything ahead of your recovery, if you're an addict, you're going to lose all of those things. So you have to make, make it the number one thing. So before someone gets their stride or someone comes to a meeting for a year and then they drop out and it's because of apathy. I mean, say they really like it, it is really valuable, but for some reason they just, you know, they just like, what do you do when there's still that magic moment of time? And I know we're talking about it in the context of my business, but I'm really not talking about it just for me. I mean, I. This applies to so many people. So let's, let's, let's go into that.

Yeah. So this is what I would do if, say, you were bringing me in as a consultant to solve this problem, which is always a fun exercise to frame any challenges. Pretend that you're a consultant doing this for somebody else's business is. You have to have a process in place that manages this. Otherwise if it's not managed, it's not going to be tended to. And so we just accept the fact that, first of all, some clients will fall off even if you do everything right. In fact, a majority of clients that leave you will leave you regardless of how well you do your job and how good you framed the opportunity and so forth, because they don't remember the framing so much when they signed up. They just know what the pain is that they're experiencing right now. In the moment that makes that impulsive decision not to want to come back. And so you have to have indicators in the organization, especially with high ticket type of individuals, where one sale represents 25,000. And so the first thing you would want to do is you say how much will be willing to reinvest in that customer and attempt to get them back. So let's just say for a $25,000 client, we'd be willing to invest $1,000 to get them back. So we could say, listen, we're willing to spend up to $1,000 follow ups for somebody who quits paying us and attempt to get them back. Because the reality is that money would probably be better spent on that client than trying to get a net new client who's never done business with you, your return on investment would probably be higher. Right? So if we say $1,000. Now, here's the thing about apathy and the thing about all marketing is quantity sometimes becomes its own quality. And so it's less about doing the one thing or saying the one thing or figuring out the one answer to get somebody back in the door. It's more about consistent, repetitive, hey, I'm still thinking about you a week later, Thinking about you again, you know, a month later, hey, remember me? I'm the guy that's still thinking about you to this very day. So that's, that's got to be in the process. So if we have $1,000 and we can touch them, say we're going to touch them up to 20 times before we let them go. So we will touch them 20 times in the next year and follow ups, and we'll spend on average $50 per person per follow up. So this will allow us to include really cool stuff in a package. If we were to send them a package, this will allow us to, you know, pay somebody, you know, 20 bucks an hour if they, if they were there to specifically look at that client and clip a news article out that's specific to that client and send it to them, et cetera, et cetera. Right? You know, so I did this literally the other night, last night with Jay Abraham. So I'm sitting there reading this book and the person mentions Jay in the book. So I highlight it, send a picture, take a picture, send it to Jay. And then I remind Jay, I said, hey, listen, you know, because Jay asked me to help him out and talk to somebody for him if I would. And I said, listen, if this person ever got back to me, however, I guarantee you I'll talk to them. For 30 minutes if you, if they can contact me in the next week. And then Jay sent me back this really great message. Now that was done by chance, right? Now imagine if you had a system and a process in place internally in your company that says these are our highest value clients. We will lose 20% of them every year. That's generally the breakdown. And this is how we will get back 10% of the 20% we lose with pure, almost automated follow up. It doesn't even have to necessarily be personal. So to the point, like I'll give you an example, Joe. I said that, I said to Joe, this is so funny, he's got Mike working for him right now and basically his task, Mike to just start doing outbound calls to people, trying to reconnect with them, you know, past clients. So I asked Mike, I said what's your script? And Mike gives me the script and it's, you know, it's typical, which therefore means it's not very good. If it's the normal script that you hear, you know, it's not going to work. It's got to be something unique or different because they've heard this before. And so then I do some role playing with Mike. I get them on the phone, I said listen, the next person you get on the phone, if you can bring me in and even though I don't even know to do what, what's going on, I'll talk to the person just to show you how it's done because there's a simple pattern that you can follow to re engage somebody. And I said this is what's going to happen. Most of the people you talk to immediately are not going to be in a position to move forward with anything. In fact, if that's your agenda, you're going to lose that relationship because it's going to be treated transactionally, right? I said what you need to do is when that call is done, take what you just heard about that person that you know is important and put it on your calendar a week later to either find a 10 minute talk or find some article that somebody contributed or one of those one pagers that Joe has for 25k members or something that's an asset related specifically and uniquely to that individual and send that to them next week with a note telling them that you're thinking about them and that you would like to at one point get them back into Genius network. And then I said, I said, Mike, you eventually do that until they either tell you to leave them alone or they roll over and Say, here's my credit card. I'm in. Okay, I give up. Fine, I'll be back in the group. But you kill them with kindness. And so. But that needs to be a systematic process that needs to actually be part of some operating procedure within the company. And it should be, because you will probably capture two to three to four million dollars of money. And if you spend a little bit of advertising on that portion, it's going to give you a higher ROI than just going out cold.

I totally agree with that. I'm sitting there typing on mute.

Because.

That'S really great advice. Like, anyone could actually apply that. Because at the end of the day, if you just simply look at the profitability of a company, you're in the arithmetic business. And so you got to be able to make the math work. And if you kill people with kindness, even the like. Look, I mean, I can speak for us. All of us have had people that we have had hire us or join one of our groups or buy some of our materials, have applied it, have made a lot of money, have given us video, written audio testimonials, have told us in person that you changed my life. I've made a million dollars. And then they drop out or they don't buy something again or whatever. And you kind of like scratch your.

Head and be like, huh, all right.

What the hell is going on? And so I have, of course, my own thoughts on this and even ways I describe it, but what if you guys had to call that something other than apathy? What would you call it? You know, like, some people get pissed and say, well, these people don't give a shit and they're ungrateful. Other people, like, well, you know, you remember for your last play, other people are like, well, they forgot about it. I mean, there's positive and negative ways that you can view that, but what do you guys call that?

I would think. I think Zig Ziglar had it right. That they might call that stinking thinking. That they're not thinking.

Right.

That's really it.

Yeah, well, that's actually a term. I don't know if you know this. I don't know if you know this, Dean, but that term, actually, I think that came out of a. For alcoholics. Stinking thinking.

Yeah. Okay. Well, I remember all the only person I ever heard say was Zig Ziglar.

That's because you're probably not in a lot of 12 step meetings, but still. Okay, so stinking thinking.

Checkup from the neck up.

That I.

Think that a lot of it is the fault of not framing in the beginning how to acknowledge, document and track ROI that when you know, if you're doing it, you've seen a lot of the infographics and stuff that I do. One of the most important things that we've done for our money making websites members, for our Realtor members is tracking the ROI on a cumulative basis so that you see that they are.

When.

We celebrate, when they reach what we call escape velocity. Right. I've shown you this graph where you look at the cumulative amount of money that people spend. If you think about, if you're framing it from the beginning at Genius Network where your, the timeline goes out 10 years and it goes up in $25,000 increments at 25, 10 years out at $250,000. That's the baseline expenditure that you're making or the investment that you're making over that period of time. But then each meeting or each month or each, you know, whenever something happens, paying attention to what are the. Because they're always going to come either from a contact or an idea that you've got that drove an ROI and that to measure that and look at it and track the cumulative outcome that you get. If people are aware of, if people it's switching from day trading to value investing.

Right.

Like if you're not trying to like people pick mastermind groups like they're picking a stock, you know, where they're taking a short term thinking where I'm going to try Genius Network and then I'm going to, I'll jump over here and try this group and then I'll switch over to this group and they're taking the same amount of money. They're their education budget and they're you know, doing different groups rather than looking at it as a capital investment that they're investing and driving the ROI on that so that a membership in Genius Network is self sustaining. That when you get to a point where you talk about 10 times and you throw that out there and you say that to people that if you can't get, you know, a 10 times return on your investment that you know, we don't, we don't want you back kind of thing, but there's no other, there's no other mention or driving or noting of that. Right. It's not, it's not mentioned or celebrated or acknowledged or tracked or focused on, you know.

Yep, that's a very good point.

I think if you presence that you've got all the pieces of it because you have people write down elegant ideas. You have them capture them while they're at the thing, the thing that they're going to do going forward. But it would be an interesting thing if every time somebody walked in the room, their chart is there and the first thing we do is update their chart. What have they done and what is the ROI of that? You know, so that it's being tracked. And to celebrate when somebody is above the line, if somebody truly did join, spend $25,000, they got a $250,000 ROI on that, or did a 10 times multiple or something happened that you can attribute to an idea or a contact or a piece of business that they did with somebody else in the, in the network that it would be ridiculous for them to not continue to let the winners ride. You know, like if you're investing in a stock that you put $25,000 in and it went up to 250,000, you're going to let that ride. You're going to let that continue to.

Go.

I think presence.

No, no, I mean really what it is, you know, say that again. The last thing you just said, that's really.

That, that would be my, you know, the, the bookend approach of it is starting at the beginning to set up that context and focus on their return on Genius. Because some of the returns, as you mentioned when we've had these conversations before, some of the returns are non monetary. Right. And some people are okay with that.

But.

They'Ve got to recognize that whatever non monetary reason they had for being part of genus network is being met, that they're getting that full ro return on genius that they were hoping for looking for.

You know, Dean, that's what you just described to me is another example of counteracting apathy. This is like preemptive, right? Because you are documenting and showing that you're thinking about them by documenting their wins and by charting their progress so they don't have to. That is a, that is a very, very powerful statement to the client that I care about you when others may not care about you this much. So I thought that was interesting because I never really thought about it from that perspective because I understand, obviously the more you indoctrinate people into getting addicted to your results that you can give them, the more likely they are to stay. Just like, you know, Joe. Joe's addicted to remodeling houses, even though he knows it's not good for him.

I remodel one house and all of a sudden it becomes this whole labeling. I got now, right. By the way, people that are listening to this. Before we started recording this conversation, I went and looked at another house that requires remodeling that I am not going to buy. That I did not buy. But before we started the podcast recording, I was saying to Dean like he had, and I'd like you to share that analysis in the exact way that you shared it. I'm kidding. It was quite a crude way of explaining an analogy of why you do not want to get into remodeling. This is coming from a guy who's taught more real estate agents how to sell houses than most people in the world. It was just really funny. But I just wanted for the record, I'm not into remodeling houses. It nearly.

One last thing I'll say actually, I know we got to wrap up here soon, is have you ever guys heard of the concept called the fundamental attribution error?

The fundamental attribution error?

Yeah, it's called the Fae. Yeah, okay, Fae. The fundamental.

Yeah.

Ben Hardy actually writes about it in his book Willpower Doesn't Work, although he doesn't really talk about it too much. But I learned this in psychology is it's really interesting. We tend to attribute power, other people based on their character and more so on ourselves, based on the situation. So what that means is if I was rude to you guys today, but I only slept one hour last night because, you know, I was up all night worrying and freaked out and scared, I'm not going to think, boy, I was an asshole. I'm going to think, well, I didn't get much sleep, so it's a situational thing.

Right?

But you guys aren't going to say, hmm, I wonder if Jason didn't get much sleep last night. You're going to say, well, damn, Jason's an asshole. So you're attributing a character judgment on me and I'm attributing a situational judgment on myself. Now, the reality is it's always a mix, but there's a lot of situational factors that can determine somebody's behavior, good or bad, and we typically don't give them that benefit. We only give them the benefit of character traits because those are easy to understand and they're easy to label and they're easy to judge. And so when somebody who you might make millions of dollars for in the past doesn't come back, it would be easy to label that person an ungrateful, selfish asshole. Right. Might not know is his wife doesn't want him to come back because he was cheating on her. With some woman that he met at the seminar and now he can't come back. That's a situational problem. Right? So the chat and so no amount of tracking of money that you made, no amount of service, no amount of help, no amount of any of that kind of stuff is going to fix that situation. So we have to be okay with a certain amount of churn and a certain amount of hey, that's just what that is. No matter how much we help certain people, we're going to be disappointed if we think that every time we help somebody that that's going to continue to make them want to come back even if we did everything right. And so it's just good for us to be more aware of. There are potentially situations that are not related to character traits whatsoever that could get somebody to fall back out by being non judgmental. We are more likely to get them to come back in because situations are just that, they're situational. They can change and they often do change. But I was talking to Joe about this the other day, Dean. There's on states and there's off states. When somebody has to go back through the process proactively to re sign up on their own for a program that they fell out of, they're in an off state and they need to be switched into an on state. When somebody's in the program already for them to quit, they have to go to an off state. Both of those require extra effort than doing the thing that they're already doing. And so the challenge with this client is their situation probably has changed. They would come back in, but it's on their list of things that they want to do but they never seem to get done. And if you can come in and be of service to them and take that challenge away from them because their situation has changed and make it easy for them to sign up by doing as much of the heavy lifting as possible. You're going to get a lot of people that are going to be able to come back because it's a situation, it's not a character trait.

That's really, that's really an interesting thing. One of the mechanisms that we use to do that and we use it in our, you know, our realtor programs is instituting a, what we call a red light, yellow light, green light program for measuring where everybody is right now. And if you can, like right now it's either the, I guess the big win is having a system in place that helps you identify when somebody switches to yellow. You know, you're talking about that on or off state. Right. Which would be a red or green light, that somebody is happy and 100% engaged and getting a result and they know it and they're going to happily continue. And then red is when they have not renewed. And now you're looking at it and saying, oh, they didn't renew what happened. Right. As opposed to having some mechanism for monitoring, checking in throughout the course of the year while somebody's in to see are they kind of, you know, green light right now? And when do they. When they switch to yellow. It's always easier to make sure that somebody goes from yellow to green rather than yellow to red, you know, because they've already. That transition happens. You know, nobody's just like waking up and they're not. They're not mad. They're just, you know, that it's just not working out or it's not.

Whatever.

They've stopped paying attention to it.

They've got it.

It's out of their.

Frame.

You know, it would be so easy to track the metrics on that. Hey, what are the open rates of people that. In 25k and if they're dipping below a certain percentage, that indicates. Right. If they constantly say they're going to come to the event and then they don't end up showing up. That's an indicator.

You.

We can chart probably three or four or five indicators that would tell us with high probability, this is somebody who's in danger of being lost. Right.

That's what we were doing is tracking because it was a membership program. We're tracking logins. We were tracking, you know, if somebody hadn't logged in for two weeks, there's something that would switch them to yellow and that would trigger somebody reaching out to them, you know, unbeknownst to them, of course, like not, hey, you turned yellow. It's not with that, but just like that. Checking in on somebody is a preemptive thing. And then they're like, oh, so it's almost serendipitous that you're doing. It's not kind of checking in to say, hey, I noticed you, you turned yellow. Are you. Are you mad at us? Or whatever. It's not that at all. It's.

Yeah. Hey, we're spying on you. Yeah, it's just, oh, I was thinking about you. Wink, wink.

Right. No, this is.

This is real. This is really good. You know what I'd like to do, guys? Because one thing too, and I'd like to bring him on one of the podcast episodes with us, is our friend Jody Williamson, who wrote the Contrarian Salesperson. And yesterday there was some messages going back and forth when I was flying back to Arizona from la and Jody had spent a few hours with my team before the last Genius Network meeting going over and he gave a great 10 minute talk on, you know, pain selling because he's one of the top Sandler franchises in the country. And basically, you know, he has like just great ways of asking questions and evoking pain. And I think a lot of it just enhances sort of the conversations that we're about. So this is more like a sneak peek of what we'll, you know, have in the, in a future episode. But what I'd like to do is maybe continue this conversation on the next episode that we can do, all three of us together where we actually go deep into. Because, Jason, I can do it right now, but I think you guys are like in a limited time frame. So I'm thinking we make this another episode and I do want to give it the proper care and nurturing so that we can really kind of go deep with how do people have these conversations? Because I agree, I mean, my takeaway here is for one, lots of ways to track and measure and frame and set up systems so that people are truly seeing the value that they're getting from doing business with you. And if someone's listening to this, that doesn't offer a coaching program, whatever sort of relationships that you're having with your clients, and if you're delivering value to these clients and it's not really being perceived or realized or even shown what they're actually getting, it's a lot easier for someone to go somewhere else. And what I do know about entrepreneurs that are like high, quick starts, they're not very, they're not very monogamous with ideas, and they're not very monogamous with books, and they're not very monogamous with consultants, and they're not very monogamous with groups. You know, they'll bounce around and looking for the new thing. New thing, the new thing, the bigger, better deal. The whatever's going to, you know, the bright shiny object, however you want to frame it. And the fact is, the longer you stay with a good relationship, the better it's going to be for you, especially in business and in depth. So it's not just. This is not just a conversation about retention. This is actually a conversation about how to be valuable. Because I know from my own experience there's a lot of areas with Genius Network that I could improve with what we're talking about. And I've also had enough people that, you know, I've had this group for long enough to where people drop out and they literally, their strategies will get worse, they will make less money and they will come back into the group and some of them will apologize that they ever dropped out in the first place and how much of a difference it was making for them. And like, you know, one of my great examples is my financial advisor, Jim Doo. Jim, you know, he's been my advisor for 20 years, and he was in the group in the very beginning. Dropped out after a year, several years went by, then he dropped back in. And I mean, he said it, you know, several times. He's like, dumbest thing I ever did was dropping out of Genius Network. And now it's like when I really look at how much, you know, it's helped my business, how much it's helped my clients, how much other, you know, business I've gotten as a result of it, you know, that sort of thing. And so if you're selling something that's good, you're actually not only hurting yourself if you don't have a way to, you know, have, you know, continual retention, but you're actually, you know, there's a lot of value you're just not able to give to other people as a result of it. So that's. Any. Any final things you guys want to say related to this episode?

That's all good. Like, everything about it.

Jason, we're waiting for you.

I said I like it.

Yeah. Can you hear me?

That was powerful. That was powerful. All right, everyone. Yeah, I can.

I can hear you.

Okay.

I can hear you.

You're there. So you guys just hang on the line before we go, we're gonna, like, you know, put a nice button on this for everyone that's listening to this. I love to hear your feedback. Wherever you've heard this episode, please comment, share. And if you've got any questions for us, I would like to, in the future, Dean and Jason to maybe have a live call in session where people just call in and ask questions and we, you know, we record that and we, you know, do Q and A. I think that will be fun. So that's. Let's figure out a formal way to actually do something like that. That would be pretty cool. Okey dokey.

Let's do it.

Awesome. All right, everyone, if you're not currently subscribing to I love Marketing, then go to wherever you listen to podcasts, itunes, whatever, and subscribe and we will see you on the next episode. We won't actually see you. You will hear us. Maybe we will. We might see you, depending on whatever technology Jason's using right now to talk to us, but that's it. Have a good day. Good night, wherever you're at, and talk to you next time. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of I Love Marketing. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network Annual event, please visit geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com if you would like access to the complete presentation, the show notes, the links, and the special resources for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com 328 that's ilovemarketing.com 328. Sam.